Mystical Landscapes at Musée d’Orsay

Starry Night over the Rhone at Arles, Vincent van Gogh

Wassily Kandinsky called for a spiritual revolution in his 1911 manifesto “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” so that artists might express their inner lives in abstract “non-material” terms. The exhibition “Beyond the Stars. The Mystical Landscape from Monet to Kandinsky” at Paris’ Musée d’Orsay revisits artists such as Kandinsky who during the late 19th and early 20th century attempted to evoke the transcendental in their work.

The exhibition organized by Musée d’Orsay in collaboration with Art Gallery of Ontario (to June 25, 2017) looks at landscape painting as a mystical quest. Claude Monet was described painting his “Water Lilies” (Nymphéas) after hours of Zen-like meditation beside his Japanese water garden in Giverny. The exhibition includes both well-know paintings such as Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night over the Rhone at Arles” and lesser known work such as a series of mystical lithographs by the recently rediscovered French artist Charles Marie Dulac, which illustrates St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of Creation.”

“Beyond the Stars. The Mystical Landscape from Monet to Kandinsky” to June 25, 2017, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.